Just after lunch we had a talk given by Karl Abson, who is a Lecturer of Creative Technology at Bradford University and he spoke to us about the project he had just been working on which involved the motion capture of a horse and how he went about doing it.
He first started his project by researching, and learning everything there is to know, from veterinary books, to be able to learn about the skeleton of a horse. He then spoke about the theory of the Uncanny Valley; which is technique that is all about the closer you get to human likeness the more faults there are going to be and noticed. This means that we still cannot achieve perfect realism in film yet no matter how much visual effects we throw into it as there is still going to be a few characteristics that aren't going to be right and also things that are wrong are going to be more noticeable.
The storyboard would come next and this is probably one of the most important parts to the project as you need to know every section of what you are doing on set and when; without this you are blind. We then spoke about how to achieve this model of a horse and how it is going to be produced, in which the obvious answer is to use motion capture, but other alternatives can be explored to. Such as using puppets, but obviously they do not look realistic and another option would be to actually film the animal. This would have been okay to do for this project as we can usually train horses to respond to human wishes, but take the film Life of Pi for example; this would never in a million years have been possible without CGI unless we has about 10 acting doubles that didn't mind losing limbs.
The reason that MoCap (Motion Capture) has now become a massive success is also down to how convenient it actually is to companies, especially those who do not have millions to spend. MoCap benefits us by:
- Removing risk such as working with dangerous animals
- It's cheaper and quicker than animation
- The animator can focus on being more creative for the project
To continue with the horse motion capture the next step that they carried out was to draw a physical skeleton on the horse, just using body paint which wouldn't have bothered the horse in any way, and then taking videos of it moving to help located where the bones will move and how they move. This is then able to help them when it comes to animating later. They then stuck markers to the horse and set up a series of cameras around the arena in which they where filming in and shot the horse running and jumping with a rider, who was also wearing markers.
This footage is then taken into software to be edited, and in this particular case Blade. This software learns where the places of the markers are and labels them all, as a lot of function in this software is done automatically for the animator, again reducing work load. Then the proper skeleton and bones of the model can be made here before taking it into Maya to be animated further. In the future it can also be predicted that we may be able to start filming without markers at all, reducing in costs even further, but this technology is a good twenty years away right now.
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